PostgreSQL Interview Questions and Answers

PostgreSQL, often simply Postgres, is an object-relational database management system (ORDBMS) with an emphasis on extensibility and standards compliance. As a database server, its primary functions are to store data securely and return that data in response to requests from other software applications. It can handle workloads ranging from small single-machine applications to large Internet-facing applications (or for data warehousing) with many concurrent users; on macOS Server, PostgreSQL is the default database] and it is also available for Microsoft Windows and Linux (supplied in most distributions).

PostgreSQL is ACID-compliant and transactional. PostgreSQL has updatable views and materialized views, triggers, foreign keys; supports functions and stored procedures, and other expandability.

PostgreSQL was designed to run on UNIX-like platforms. However, PostgreSQL was then also designed to be portable so that it could run on various platforms such as Mac OS X, Solaris, and Windows. PostgreSQL is free and open source software. Its source code is available under PostgreSQL license, a liberal open source license. You are free to use, modify and distribute PostgreSQL in any form. PostgreSQL requires very minimum maintained efforts because of its stability. Therefore, if you develop applications based on PostgreSQL, the total cost of ownership is low in comparison with other database management systems.

PostgreSQL is highly programmable, and therefore extendible, with custom procedures that are called “stored procedures”. These functions can be created to simplify the execution of repeated, complex and often required database operations. Although this DBMS does not have the popularity of MySQL, there are many amazing third-party tools and libraries that are designed to make working with PostgreSQL simple, despite this database’s powerful nature. Nowadays it is possible to get PostgreSQL as an application package through many operating-system’s default package manager with ease.

PostgreSQL, originally called Postgres, was created at UCB by a computer science professor named Michael Stonebraker, who went on to become the CTO of Informix Corporation.

PostgreSQL is an open source, object-relational database management system (ORDBMS). It is used to store data securely; supporting best practices and allow retrieving them when request is processed. It supports both SQL (relational) and JSON (non-relational) querying. PostgreSQL (Post-gress-Q-L) is developed by the PostgreSQL Global Development Group (a worldwide team of volunteers). It is not controlled by any corporation or other private entity. It is open source and its source code is available free of charge. It runs on numerous platforms including Linux, most flavors of UNIX, Mac OS X, Solaris, Tru64, and Windows. It supports text, images, sounds, and video, and includes programming interfaces for C / C++, Java, Perl, Python, Ruby, Tcl and Open Database Connectivity (ODBC).

Data integrity: When reliability and data integrity are an absolute necessity without excuses, PostgreSQL is the best choice.

Complex, custom procedures: If you require your database to perform custom procedures, PostgreSQL, being extensible, is the best choice.

Integration: In the future, if there is a chance of necessity arising for migrating the entire database system to a propriety (e.g. Oracle) solution, PostgreSQL will be the most compliant and easy to handle base for the switch.

Complex designs: Compared to other open-source and free RDBMS implementations, for complex database designs, PostgreSQL offers the most in terms of functionality and possibilities without giving up on other valuable assets.

Multi-Version Concurrency Control (MVCC) is an advanced technique for improving database performance in a multi-user environment. This feature or time lag occurs when someone else is on the content. All the transactions are kept as a record.

In computer science, write-ahead logging (WAL) is a family of techniques for providing atomicity and durability (two of the ACID properties) in database systems. AL (Write-Ahead Logging) is a standard method for ensuring data integrity. A detailed description can be found in most (if not all) books about transaction processing. Briefly, WAL’s central concept is that changes to data files (where tables and indexes reside) must be written only after those changes have been logged, that is, after log records describing the changes have been flushed to permanent storage.

CTIDs identify specific physical rows by their block and offset positions within a table. They are used by index entries to point to physical rows. A logical row’s CTID changes when it is updated, so the CTID cannot be used as a long-term row identifier. But it is sometimes useful to identify a row within a transaction when no competing update is expected

There are built in functions such as B-tree, hash table, and GIST indices can be used or users can define their own indices. PostgreSQL can scan the index backwards. An expression index can be created with the addition of a WHERE clause. Partial index created with addition of WHERE clause

This command is used for enabling compilation of all libraries and applications. This process generally slows down the system and it also increases the binary file size. Debugging symbols are present which can assist developers in noticing bugs and problems associated with their script.

Some of the languages which PostgreSQL supports are as follows: – It supports a language of its own known as PL/pgSQL and it supports internal procedural languages. Pl/pgSQL can be compared to oracle, PL/SQL, etc. Languages such as Perl, Python, TCL can be used as embedded languages.

There are various enhancements provided to the straight relational data model by PostgreSQL they are support for arrays which includes multiple values, inheritance, functions and extensibility. Jargon differs because of its object-oriented nature where tables are called as classes.

Yes. Like other open source databases, PostgreSQL is easy to run in virtual containers and is highly portable. Several companies have support for PostgreSQL in cloud hosting environments, including Heroku, GoGrid and Joyent.